Artists

Brian Adam

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Artist Profile: Brian Adam

"I am a jeweller with an eye for fun. Back in the 1980s and 90s I found delight in making spectacles -which is one of the most interesting areas of body adornment for me, and possibly the most humorous.

My earrings and rings emerge from working right on the materials: selecting gemstone rough and local shell and setting them in a nice pure silver bezel. The bezel base is sterling silver imprinted with a secret texture.

I use the usual jewellery metals that I alloy up when required and then set my shell and gem bits as protection. My special interests: sand-casting, matrix dies, fold-forming, steel toolmaking, Japanese alloys and button ingots, niobium and titanium colouring, and hot-join technology.

I trained as a designer at Wellington Polytechnic in the late 1960s, and after a period of wandering I learned jewellery from Ruth Baird from 1979. I also taught myself with help from a variety of sources: working for Warwick Freeman, going on workshops by visiting jewellers, and just devising my own processes. In 1985 Ruth and I built a studio behind our house. We share it with emerging jewellers as bench-hands and I teach "independent tuition, ancient, modern low-tech, hand-tech, lateral, all ages even post-grad".

Passing on ideas has increasingly become important to me. I especially enjoy seeing what children and teenagers can do when they are let loose in the studio."